The existing Long Term Evolution (LTE) waveform structure involves an LTE subframe occupying one millisecond (ms) in time, with its frequency domain resource occupancy being primarily dependent on the traffic pay load size, channel quality etc. In an unlicensed frequency band, due to a region-specific regulation requiring a listen-before-talk mechanism in devices to determine if the medium is busy, an on-going LTE transmission can potentially prevent these devices from accessing the medium. The 1 ms subframe structure is especially inefficient at low-to-medium traffic loads where the LTE transmissions are typically frequency sparse. The inefficiency may manifest across two dimensions. In one case, inefficiency in low-to-medium traffic results in poor resource utilization of valuable unlicensed spectrum over a 1 ms time interval. Additionally, the time occupied by a sequence of 1 ms LTE subframes could have been better utilized by more agile technologies such as Wi-Fi, which can operate with much smaller waveform durations. This inefficiency results in sub-optimal performance from overall system perspective.